


Luck Be a Goddess

by havocthecat



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Las Vegas, Original Female Characters - Freeform, apotheosis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-25 22:24:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21363640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/havocthecat/pseuds/havocthecat
Summary: "The only sure thing about luck is that it will change." --Bret Harte"Luck be a lady with me." --Frank Sinatra"Diligence is the mother of good fortune." --Miguel de Cervantes SaavedraA penny lying casually on the ground was a trap for someone like her. For anyone whose attention that Tyche was trying to get. Emma tried to move away from it, maybe cross the street and escape before the luck could hit her. Problem was her sensible loafers got caught on a crack in the sidewalk and stumbled over three separate couples, a drunk twentysomething wearing a fraternity logo on his baseball cap, and a bride's wedding train - she yelled an apology that wasn't accepted - and then almost caught herself on the doors to the Flamingo. Almost.
Relationships: Luck Goddess/Her Favorite Human
Comments: 10
Kudos: 29
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2019





	Luck Be a Goddess

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Icie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icie/gifts).

> Thank you to Kairos and Ilthit for betareading for me, ArgentumLS for the story feedback, to Celli for all of the above and non-stop encouragement and friendship, and to the hippos at the Yuletide Discord for the random match-up. I got incredibly lucky and you are very generous and thoughtful, all of you.

Emma walked down the street, half-blind from a migraine caused by the lighting. She hunched her shoulders and wrapped her arms around herself, trying - and failing - to avoid bumping into her fellow passers-by. The lights of the Las Vegas strip cascaded down on Emma in a waterfall of neon and bright white bulbs that lit up one after another in an endless, coruscating wave of blinking incandescence. The desert air was warm and dry, which was the only thing keeping her from utter misery, since she'd left her jacket on the plane and hadn't noticed until she'd left the airport.

She'd been trying to avoid Las Vegas for years, ever since she hit eighteen and realized what had been going on in her life. It wasn't just that chance favored her, or that she sometimes hit bad patches. Oh, no, lucky, lucky Emma with the plain brown hair and ordinary face had chanced to catch the eye of Tyche, the schoolgirl who had become a goddess when fortune had apotheosized from an abstract concept into an actual deity. 

Tyche had been one of the first apotheoses. She'd been sitting at the lunch table right next to Emma, her baloney and mustard sandwich unwrapped and laying on the tacky vinyl, ignored when she'd found an eyelash on Emma's face. She'd been blowing it off Emma's fingertip 'for luck' when she'd dissolved into sunlight and a whirl of neon and luck. Laws had been passed across the world forbidding parents to give their children names based on classical deities or fairy tale figures after The Great Apotheosis. No one could tell which children were going to be the focus of an apotheotic incident these days, but a name had been an instant focus in the mid-1990s. 

A penny glinted on the sidewalk, bringing Emma back to the present when the bright copper caught her eye. It reflected blue, then purple, then red under the lights of the Flamingo's sign. Emma stopped and stared down at it, then stepped around it as she stared at the crowd around her and tried to look like she wasn't staring. Her vision hazed out into a blur of light and everyone got an outline of light around them for an instant. Emma squeezed her eyes shut and leaned against the Flamingo's wall, trying to avoid looking at anything else, especially the penny. One of those lying casually on the ground was a trap for someone like her. For anyone whose attention that Tyche was trying to attract. 

Emma tried to move away from the penny, maybe cross the street and escape before the luck could hit her. Problem was her sensible loafers got caught on a crack in the sidewalk and stumbled over three separate couples, a drunk twentysomething wearing a fraternity logo on his baseball cap, and a bride's wedding train - she yelled an apology that wasn't accepted - and then almost caught herself on the doors to the Flamingo. Almost.

The change from white lightbulbs to a giant pink lotus sign shining right above Emma made the world spin around her so fast that she fell over someone's black and white chevron suitcase and almost faceplanted through the Flamingo's doors, but caught herself on her hands. Why would Las Vegas have so much neon? Didn't they understand that neon was hell? The marble tile was so hard she could feel the shock all the way up her arms. She was lucky she hadn't broken anything. Lucky. Hah. If they'd been revolving doors, she'd have been fine, but she'd had the bad luck to be in front of the one casino old enough to have doors that opened outward. 

Everyone stared as Emma stood up and dusted herself off. At least half a dozen slot machines in view of the lobby hit the jackpot and Emma's head exploded into pain while her vision ringed with a new aura of green and yellow fireworks. 

"Congratulations!" A very sharply-dressed man beelined at her with a bleached smile and a tan that betokened skin cancer at an early age. At least half his attention was on the jackpots and whatever casino security was screaming in the flesh-colored earpiece she wasn't supposed to notice. "We've been holding a contest, and you're the one thousandth person to come through the door in the past hour! You've won a free weeklong stay in our honeymoon suite and a bottle of complimentary champagne, plus a free personal shopper to accompany your for the duration of your stay in our hotel!"

He sounded so chipper. He was doing a great job pretending she hadn't just fallen flat on her face and should be nursing a broken nose or a busted wrist. Was the hotel slow? It couldn't be that slow. This was Friday and the casino floor was full. Maybe they were trying to distract everyone from the burly people in suits converging on the jackpot winners. Emma didn't look rich, or like she needed a personal shopper. 

Emma groaned, to the great confusion of Honeymoon Suite, who was trying to usher her to a waiting concierge. She wondered if Tyche would stop inflicting bad luck on her for her own good, or good luck on the people around her. Or good luck on her. Was the honeymoon suite supposed to make up for the migraine? Had Tyche ever grown up? Could she? The anthropologists that studied The Great Apotheosis had hypothesized that the apotheosized were stuck at whatever emotional age they'd come to godhood at, but Emma didn't like to think of Tyche stuck at age fourteen forever.

Coppery curls bounced next to her, and Emma turned to see Tyche's brilliant blue eyes. "You're trying to avoid me," she pointed out, stepping off the casino carpeting and into the lobby. At a green felted table behind her, someone lost a hand of poker and threw their cards at the winner, but Emma barely noticed the cursing or the flying cards. 

Tyche's hair hung in long copper ringlets down to the small of her back, and she was filling out her bright purple leggings and the bubblegum pink and black raglan sleeve t-shirt she was wearing with wide hips and breasts that drew Emma's eyes before she snapped them up to Tyche's face. She beamed at Emma with a bright, gleaming smile that reminded her of sophomore year and when they would sneak out of school to go to the coffee shop and order sextuple espressos instead of going to gym class. Emma had always thought it was lucky they'd never gotten caught. Hmph. 

"Heya." Tyche tried again, standing across from Emma. She shifted her weight from one leg to the other, then back again, as Emma stared at her. "So, uh, it's been a while."

Emma narrowed her eyes and frowned. People streamed by, splitting around the two of them without noticing or knocking into them. Of course they did. It was just too, too lucky. Honeymoon Suite stared at her and she shook her head at him. "I'll find you later. What? Do you treat all your contest winners like this when they run into old friends?"

He almost ran to get away from her. Them. He looked worried. He should stop tanning and bleaching, though. He almost had a fault line in one of his teeth. She wondered if his dentist had told him?

"I went to all of this trouble to get you here. Don't you want to say anything? It's been ten years." Tyche pleaded with her. She looked adorably sad with her huge blue eyes in the same way as she did when she wheedled Emma into keeping watch so she could break into the teacher's lounge and steal doughnuts. 

They had been very good doughnuts; Emma still remembered the taste of them melting in her mouth as the sugar had powdered down her shirt like snow. They'd been caught because of that powdered sugar and had detention for a month, stuck in the library with a librarian that Emma had been convinced hated books. They'd put up with it together, giggling and laughing and quoting Pride and Prejudice to each other in ridiculous fake accents while working on the paper they'd been assigned once they'd shelved all the books wrong.

Okay, they'd done that on purpose to get out of shelving the books, but it had been worth writing a paper to listen to Tyche pretending to be Mr. Darcy proposing to her. It had made Emma weak in the knees as she'd listened, rapt, to her best friend professing love for her, and she'd thought to herself, '_Oh, shit, this is what I'm in for._.'

The librarian had squinted at them and looked like she'd been sucking on a lemon. Emma spent her entire high school career convinced that woman had hated fun. Or baby lesbians. Possibly both.

The very next day they'd been out of detention, and Tyche had been caught up in The Great Apotheosis. Emma had been bereft and grieving and she hadn't quite gotten over it all these years. Even with luck - good, bad, didn't matter - following her around like a high school crush that had never gone away.

Emma huffed out a breath, rolled her eyes, and stomped out the door, from the lobby, into the neon of the pink lotus sign and then the cascading waves of white lightbulbs, down the street away from Tyche. Every step sent jagged streaks of pain arcing across her skull and multicolored sparkles tinged at the corner of her vision. Her backpack was rubbing at her shoulders and she was going to have a blister by the time she found a place to stay for the night that didn't involve winning a contest, but it wouldn't be the Flamingo. 

"I cannot believe this," she muttered.

"There are so many of us." Tyche walked next to her, glowing - no, literally - with good fortune, in her leggings and bubblegum pink t-shirt and with her penny-copper hair and blue eyes. Even with the migraine turning from the green-gold sparkles of an aura into throbbing blurriness in her thoughts, Emma couldn't take her focus away from Tyche. "But no one else apotheosized into a Goddess of Fortune. Just me. I've always been lucky. You remember that? I was always lucky, but you were my lucky charm. I always had you helping me make things better. Ever since we were little. You."

Emma remembered that. Their month of library detention would've been worse if Emma hadn't wheedled the librarian into letting them write a paper on Pride and Prejudice, which was more fun than just sitting there copying out Dewey Decimal codes or shelving books. Mostly because they could give dramatic readings of the best lines in the book to each other. Or the time they'd been caught sneaking out of church before services started, and they had to organize the hymnals, Emma and Tyche had been dancing in the aisles and singing Spice Girls songs and Father Crichton never knew that it wasn't the first time they'd done it, just the first time he'd caught them.

"That was ten years ago," growled Emma. She had to stop and lean against something, because her vision was starting to go black and tunnely around the edges. 

"It's taken me ten years. Ten! To learn how to control all this! Do you know how much luck is in the world?" Tyche bounced a bit on the balls of her feet, and Emma glanced down and squeezed her eyes shut as needles stabbed through her brain. Tyche was wearing copper-colored-combat boots and they glittered and spun and whorled in the lights of the strip.

"Is that why my plane almost crashed at McCarran?" 

Tyche didn't say anything, and Emma risked a look straight up at her irritating freckled face and coppery hair and wide blue eyes and damnit that was the same look that got them into the doughnut incident and a month of detention and the realization of a lifelong crush that Emma had never gotten quite over.

"I'm really sorry. I was just trying to cause some bad weather. I didn't mean--" 

"You dumped five inches of rain in the desert! Do you think you might've overreacted!" An older woman walking past them looked up, startled, and moved so she was walking at least two feet away from Emma, who glared at the old bat in her stupid pantsuit with her Chanel purse and her diamonds and her stuffy attitude. She was probably going to stroke out in another month anyway. Something about the way her veins bulged gave Emma that idea. She just didn't look healthy.

"Some of the weather gods got a little pissy with me over that one." Tyche gnawed on her lip and hunched her shoulders, which was the way she'd always said she was sorry without ever actually apologizing for having a terrible idea, ninety percent of which had been fun. 

"Oh, Jesus," snapped Emma. She reached out and grabbed Tyche's wrist. It was burning hot, like an overheating cell phone, and when she met Tyche's surprised eyes, she was struck by the force of the surprise in them. "Come with me."

She dragged her high school best friend turned Goddess of Fortune back into the Flamingo, and kept one hand out so she could lean on whatever was available - slot machines, mostly - and stand upright the whole time. Emma waved off every single asshole trying to offer her free tickets. She wasn't into time share sales pitches. She told Honeymoon Suite she needed food and maybe she'd get back to him. Seriously, the fault lines in his teeth were turning into fissures. How often did he bleach? 

Emma avoided the luxury shops and the hall full of carts and souvenir booths. Even the wilderness sanctuary she'd liked to have gone in, and a theater called 'Bugsy's Cabaret' that she'd have made fun of on a normal day. Every time Tyche stepped onto the casino floor, every slot machine up and tilted, taking thousands of dollars of winning streaks with it. 

"Some casino executive is probably creaming his pants right now," muttered Emma, as a pair of dice hopped off a table and landed snake eyes in front of her feet. "You doing that on purpose?"

"Maybe," said Tyche, trying to look lofty and mysterious and just managing to look cute. Maybe it was the fact that the Goddess of Luck liked to wear pink that did it. Emma rolled her eyes and dragged Tyche to a booth at one of those cheap diners for middle of the night gamblers, the kind that travel books barely talked about. It was hard to feel any mystery was left about your high school crush, even if you hadn't seen her in ten years. Not when you were half blacking out from a migraine and the fluorescent lights in the diner kept flickering. 

"They talked about you on Usenet." More like they argued about her on Usenet before the whole system crashed and took most of the archives down with it. She'd spent enough late nights on alt.apotheosis.reality arguing right back to know. "If you were real."

"That's been established? I saw documentaries. The reenactment actress was bad. But is that even why you're here?" Tyche reached out and grabbed the coffee pot from a waitress who was staring at them. 

Her mouth gaped open and closed and she brandished a pad of paper and a couple of menus. "I, uh--"

"You need to leave work five minutes early today. Maybe stop by the library? Put your name in the drawing to meet that author you like." Tyche reached over and grabbed the menus and shoved them both at Emma, whose vision had narrowed down to a tiny pinprick of normal around a giant tunnel of black and verdigris green. "I don't need to eat. But I want coffee, thanks. Emma likes a burger, french fries extra crispy. Oh, and a chocolate shake with whipped cream and a cherry on top. Right, Emma?"

Emma just nodded and held her head, staring down at the table. Someone was taking a sledgehammer to the inside of her skull. Probably Tyche. "I think my head is going to explode," groaned Emma. She felt individual veins throb in her temples in time to the beating of her heart. The rhythmic pounding in her chest thundered throughout her body, from the crown of her skull to into her fingertips,and even down from the soles of her feet and into the cheap linoleum flooring below her.

"Have some coffee." Tyche's voice was soft, but Emma folded herself over the table and let her head rest on her arms. Blissful darkness closed over her and the pain faded along with everything but Tyche's concerned voice right in her ear.

She came to thirty seconds later. Maybe thirty minutes. Emma couldn't figure out how long it had been. Her sense of time was all messed up. She opened her eyes to Tyche's concerned, beautiful, freckled face. 

"I was worried." Tyche brushed Emma's plain jane brown hair back and tucked it behind her ears. Her fingers were cool against Emma's forehead as she gave her a worried look. "How long have you been sick?"

"Nrrphgh." Emma grumped into her fuzzy sleeve and wiped away a bit of drool. She sat up. The pressure in her head had eased and gone away like a thunderstorm had blown out of the sky. 

"What?" Tyche giggled and covered her mouth at Emma, looking sheepish. "Oh, Emma, you're just darling, but that was a big ol' pile of babble."

She wiped her hand on her jeans and gave Tyche a sour look as she tried again. "I get migraines. Ever since you vanished in front of me. Usually when there's too much good or bad luck."

"I want you to say in Vegas. With me." Tyche had covered Emma's hand with hers. She was hot. Warm. Manipulative, holding Emma's hand like that. She knew Emma had always liked to see Tyche smile.

"But--" Emma still was going to object. She did have plans for a life that didn't include Las Vegas, or luck goddesses that were her former childhood best friends.

"You don't want to work in insurance, do you? Not really?" Shock spiraled through Emma as Tyche pointed at her. Emma's heart fluttered at the pout, but it had always done that when Tyche was involved. 

"Underwriting is all about stability. Predictabilty." Emma could get her iPad out of her backpack and show Tyche all the math, but that subject had always made Tyche cringe. Emma had been the math nerd and the mostly good girl. Her dad was a stockbroker and her mom was a VP of actuarial sciences. Tyche was the one with her head in the clouds, dreaming of writing novels while her parents were off at archaeology digs. 

"You don't like predictability that much." Tyche squeezed Emma's hand and nudged her with one copper-booted foot as their waitress dropped her hamburger plate on the table with a clatter. The smell of greasy fried beef reached Emma's nostrils and her stomach growled. She shook Tyche off, who just gave her an indulgent look that wasn't like high school at all and warmed her right down to her toes. 

"You figure it out yet?" Tyche beamed and Emma frowned down at her plate. Well done meant there was less chance of food poisoning. She'd spent years looking for signs of Tyche's influence and ways to prove she wasn't affected by luck. That was half the reason she'd gotten the math degree, and picked up that concentration in statistics. 

Almost. She had all the classes, she just had to finish the interview, then go back to New York and pick up the degree. It was safer to fly than to drive. She looked down again. She could almost see the bacteria in the burger. No, not in the burger. On the bun. It had been laying on a cutting board that had raw chicken a few minutes before. If she ate it, she'd get sick and never get her degree.

Emma looked up, ordinary brown eyes meeting Tyche's incandescent blue eyes. "I--" She picked up the burger, stared at it and the bacteria swimming on the bun. She was getting nauseated just looking at it. "I'm too old for this. It was teens, kids, no adults got apotheosized." 

Tyche grabbed a fry off her plate. "Pretty badass, huh. Wondered how long it was going to take you to notice. Like, only your life? I mean, I'm not the goddess of invisibility."

"What?" Emma frowned at her and shook her head. Odds scrolled through Emma's mind. Risk mitigation factors learned from the internship last summer. Even the straight-up 50/50 chances of a penny toss.

"You've always been the balance I needed." Tyche grinned at her and snapped bubble gum that echoed like a gun in Emma's ears. "I just had to get you to Vegas. You know you're like me, right? Getting you here just gave you the push you needed."

Emma looked down. Everything was spinning, odds and chance and what had she been thinking, studying math? She should have listened to her dad and gotten a nice, safe business degree? This whole city was a vortex. Was she a goddess? No. It was Tyche. But maybe all the swirls of chance around her hadn't been Tyche? The keno panel was showing an exact numerical sequence of one through ten. Had that ever happened in Las Vegas' history? You could pick up to eighty numbers. 

"Maybe it just took you longer? Maybe the apotheotic scientists just focused on me because I was the obvious one?" Tyche shrugged and kept shoveling fries into her mouth. "Everyone always underestimated you, babe. Except me."

Emma grabbed Tyche's hand. She needed something solid to hold onto, but nothing was. The world was spinning around her, numbers and chance, and the only thing clear was Tyche's eyes, Tyche's hair, Tyche's freckled, glorious skin and its luminous glow. "They did studies. They tried to figure out who was going to get apotheosized. You know Mom said there are actuarial tables about that? There's no way we'd both-- You aren't the Goddess of Luck I'm not the Goddess of what? Order? Statistics? Boringness?"

"You've never been boring. Not once." Tyche was in the booth next to her, warm and soft and just as comforting a presence as she'd been at fourteen, only this time she was kissing Emma, who got to wrap her arms around Tyche and settle her head on Tyche's shoulder. "I don't know what you're the goddess of. We have to figure that out too. Let's figure you out in all kinds of ways, right?"

"I like numbers. Patterns." Emma muttered. Tyche leaned against the wall and pulled Emma back to lean against her. She was still burning up. Didn't someone once theorize that the apotheosized ran hot or cold depending on some kind of abstract concept of what they were a deity of? She'd read a study on it in one of her undergraduate courses. It hadn't been proven, because no one could get any of the newer deities to agree to come in for testing. Tyche made Emma think of warmth, and home, and stealing fresh-baked cookies tested to an absolutely precise measuring time to get the sugars caramelized just right.

Emma liked how her mom baked them the best, which was once a year, with a timer and exact measurements. She missed her mom's cookies. 

"I don't care about numbers. I like luck." Tyche settled her hand on Emma's stomach and dropped a kiss on the top of her head. "Stay in Las Vegas. With me. Will you?"

"I'll stay. I have to learn how to control this." She turned her head back and smiled at Tyche, who had bursts of copper patterns cartwheeling around her body. Was it luck? It had to be. She could see Tyche's fingerprints all over them.

The slot machines were chiming in her ears. Someone had counted out cards and Emma could see a spot on the ceiling where there was going to be a short in the wiring in about two weeks. Probably a fire, but small. Contained. Under the cement, in a hundred years, there was going to be a flash flood that washed away enough dirt that the flooring would buckle and at least two levels would collapse. 

The whole city was numbers. Odds and evens, people and statistics, order and chaos. Emma and Tyche. and no wonder her head had exploded, trying to fit everything in. The whole strip was only four miles long, but the casinos added ten times the mileage. Everything streamed at her and settled in. She could see all the patterns and sort them in her head. 

Emma reached out with one hand and pushed. The roulette wheel in the next room landed on unlucky black thirteen, but that was the number that had the most chips. Emma smiled at the screech of joy she heard. This was going to be fun.


End file.
